The Last Heroes Read online

  ‘‘Are you hungry?’’

  ‘‘I stopped for scrambled eggs on the way home,’’ Canidy said.

  ‘‘And you can’t stay?’’

  ‘‘No, I wish I could.’’

  ‘‘It was good to see you, Dick, and thanks for filling in.’’

  ‘‘Thank you again, for having me.’’

  ‘‘Don’t be silly, anytime,’’ Chesty said. He put out his hand, patted Canidy on the back, and left him.

  I don’t think he thinks I know. I hope not.

  Transient Officers’ Quarters Anacostia Naval Air Station Washington, D.C. 0630 Hours 5 June 1941

  When Lieutenant (junior grade) Edwin Howell Bitter, USN, woke he saw that the bed of Lieutenant (j.g.) Richard Canidy, USNR, had not been slept in.

  This bothered Ed Bitter, as did many other Canidy escapades in and out of bed. Dick Canidy did not, in Bitter’s opinion, conduct himself as a commissioned officer and gentleman was expected to. He was less interested in discharging his duties to the best of his ability than he was in chasing skirts. If Dick Canidy was aware of the hoary naval adage that officers were supposed to keep their indiscretions a hundred miles from the flagpole, he paid no attention to it.

  It wasn’t that Ed Bitter didn’t like Dick Canidy. He did. Canidy was not only an amusing companion, but he had, in a number of ways, made it clear that he liked Bitter, which was of course flattering, and that he considered him to be highly intelligent, which was even more flattering. But Canidy seldom bothered to conceal his disdain for the limited brainpower of their peers.

  Nor did Bitter believe chasing skirts was dishonorable. What it was was that he was a professional naval officer— with corresponding standards—and Dick was not. Dick was a civilian in uniform.

  Bitter got out of bed, stripped off his pajamas, and marched naked to the shower. Naked, he looked even more muscular than he did dressed. While Dick Canidy was spending weekends lifting the skirts of Smith coeds, Ed Bitter was lifting weights in the Naval Academy gym. It showed. He was in splendid physical shape, firm-muscled, capable of great physical exertion. But to Bitter’s annoyance, so was Dick Canidy. Half-jokingly, half-pridefully, Canidy had announced that the only college athletic program he had joined was performed in the horizontal attitude.

  He had just finished returning his safety razor to its stainless-steel snap-shut case when Dick Canidy came home.

  ‘‘Home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the lover, home from God only knows where,’’ Bitter greeted him.

  ‘‘From a very nice house in Georgetown, actually,’’ Canidy said, smiling as he started to take off his uniform. ‘‘The smell of spring in the air. The gentle murmur of Rock Creek wending its way inexorably toward the Potomac. Very romantic. ’’

  ‘‘And what about her parents? Were they conveniently away?’’

  ‘‘I don’t know about her parents,’’ Canidy said. ‘‘Her husband was away.’’

  ‘‘She was married? You can get your oversexed ass courtmartialed for that, you know. They call it conduct unbecoming, ’’ Bitter said as he buttoned the cuffs of a heavily starched gray khaki shirt. Canidy stuffed his civilian clothing in his bag, took a gray khaki shirt from his chest of drawers, and started to put it on.

  After that he took a twill aviator-green uniform from the closet. He pulled the trousers on, and as he tucked the tail of the shirt in, he looked at Ed and asked: ‘‘How was the dinner party? Did you learn anything useful?’’

  ‘‘I did, but I’m not sure I should tell you.’’

  ‘‘Come on, you’re dying to!’’

  ‘‘Did you know that we’re shipping petroleum products from the Gulf Coast to Nova Scotia?’’

  ‘‘Yeah,’’ Canidy said, straight-faced. ‘‘Where they are transferred to British ships for the Atlantic crossing. Who told you? That’s supposed to be classified.’’

  ‘‘Who told you?’’ Bitter asked, disappointed that his secret was known.

  ‘‘I couldn’t tell you that, Eddie, you understand,’’ Canidy said. ‘‘Suffice it to say that I broke bread with Colonel William ‘Wild Bill’ Medal of Honor Donovan last night.’’

  ‘‘Really?’’ Bitter wasn’t sure if his leg was being pulled or not.

  ‘‘Really,’’ Canidy said. ‘‘I learned a lot more than I really cared to learn about the strategic implications of economic warfare.’’

  Still not sure whether he was being teased or not, Bitter challenged, ‘‘Did you also know that we are going to start Catalina flights to keep an eye on our shipping?’’

  ‘‘As a matter of fact, I did,’’ Canidy lied easily. He loved to keep Eddie Bitter off balance. ‘‘Who’s been telling you all this stuff?’’

  ‘‘Admiral Derr mentioned it last night. I didn’t say anything to him, of course, but I wondered if it might not be a good idea to apply for that duty. It’s obviously important, and you could pick up a lot of hours.’’

  ‘‘Eddie, if there’s any job worse than sitting in a Kaydet teaching dummies to fly, it’s in a Catalina, flying endless circles over the ocean.’’

  ‘‘It’s something to think about,’’ Bitter said.

  ‘‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance the weather is going to keep us on the deck?’’ Canidy asked. ‘‘I could use another day in Washington.’’

  ‘‘Not a chance. I checked before I went to bed. Cloudless skies for the foreseeable future.’’

  ‘‘Shit,’’ Canidy said.

  Officers might swear, Bitter thought, but they should abstain from vulgarity.

  When they were dressed, they left the BOQ and walked across the base to the officers’ mess, where they had breakfast. Then they returned to the BOQ, picked up their luggage, and went to Base Operations.

  The glory of their selection to buzz the Naval Academy graduation was over. As soon as they could hitch a ride, which might take all day, they had to go back to Pensacola, where they could count on spending many long hours in the backseat of a Kaydet, the slowest airplane in the Navy.

  TWO

  Pensacola Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida 0615 Hours 8 June 1941

  Bitter and Canidy, in Bitter’s month-old 1940 dark green Buick Roadmaster convertible, drove across the pleasant, almost luxurious tropical base to the Mediterranean-style officers’ club. There they had breakfast.

  They had been back a day and a half, doing hardly anything but waiting to see the deputy commander so he could vicariously experience their triumph in buzzing Annapolis. But today it was back to work, and with a vengeance, Canidy thought: a long cross-country training flight.

  Canidy ate an enormous breakfast, and then, in the men’s room, read the Pensacola Journal cover to cover, while he got rid of as much liquid and bulk as he could. There were no toilets in Kaydets; and despite the many hours he had in them, he had not yet mastered the relief tube.

  Finally, they drove to the airfield, where two ensigns, already in gray flight suits, were waiting for them at Student Operations. The students followed them into the locker room, and reported on the flight plan they had laid out as Bitter and Canidy changed into their flight suits. The two instructor pilots carefully folded their green uniforms and put them into canvas flight bags. While the odds against something going wrong on their cross-country training flight were remote, if they did have to spend the night someplace they would need uniforms. Naval officers could not go into public wearing gray cotton overalls.

  They picked up their parachutes, then were driven out onto the flight line in a Ford panel truck. Dick and Ed jammed into the front seat with the sailor driver. The student pilots and the parachutes rode in the back.

  The cross-country flight (Pensacola-Valdosta-Montgomery- Mobile-Pensacola) they were about to make was the last training flight of the primary flight training program. Their students already knew how to fly, and when this flight was completed would be awarded naval aviator’s wings and sent to advanced flight training. Ed Bitter and Dick Canidy would t
hen start the whole process all over again, with four new officer students.

  Teaching fledglings how to fly was hard work and not very much fun. They both would have preferred other duty. But—for different personal reasons—both were aware that instructor pilot duty was better for them than an assignment to a fighter squadron or to an attack torpedo squadron aboard a carrier or to observation planes catapulted from a battleship would have been.

  Ed Bitter believed that duty as an IP meant several things. First, that the Navy recognized he was a better pilot than most pilots. Second, that demonstrating the leadership characteristics IPs had to have to be successful would enhance his career (a tour as an IP was considered a prerequisite to command of a squadron). He also believed that the primary duty of a commanding officer was not so much to command, to issue orders, but to teach.

  The main things that instructors did was fly. Aviators assigned to regular squadrons were lucky if they got forty hours in the air in a month. That was two hours a day, five days a week. Instructor pilots often flew three hours in the morning and three in the afternoon. In a two-year tour as an IP, Dick Canidy expected to acquire very likely more than three times the hours he would have had he been sent to an operational squadron. Aeronautical engineers with a lot of flight time were paid more money than those who had less, or who couldn’t fly at all.

  The world looked a lot different today than it had in 1938 when he’d graduated from MIT. The only worry he had had then was putting in his four years’ service. The world had been at peace then, but now that world had changed. France had fallen. Japan was fighting China. Young men his age were flying Spitfires against Messerschmitts over England. Still he refused to think about what he would do if, in June 1942, the Navy would not discharge him.

  Advanced flight training was conducted in North American SNJ-2 Texans, single-wing, all-metal, closed-cockpit six-hundred-horsepower retractable-landing-gear aircraft that cruised at about two hundred knots. Primary training was conducted using open-cockpit, fixed-landing-gear Stearman Kaydet biplanes. They weren’t really Stearmans, Boeing having some time before taken over that company, and while they were splendid basic training aircraft, stressed for acrobatics and sturdy enough to survive the inevitable hard landings, they were not really suitable for cross-country flight. The planes they would fly today, officially N2Ss, had Continental R670 engines producing a little over two hundred horsepower and a cruising speed of just over one hundred miles per hour.

  When he had been a student pilot, Ed Bitter had thought (as had just about every other student pilot passing through Pensacola) that it would have made a lot more sense to wait until the students were advanced and let them make their cross-country flights in the faster Texans. It was only after he had gone through the rest of the flight training program— including carrier qualification—and been made an instructor that he understood the Navy’s reasoning.

  A six- or seven-hundred-mile dead-reckoning flight, in an open-cockpit airplane making a hundred knots, while checking his position by looking for landmarks on the deck, was an experience the student pilot never forgot. It took him back to Eddie Rickenbacker and the Lafayette Escadrille, whose planes came with no more sophisticated navigation equipment and about the same performance as the Stearman. It was something they might need to remember when they were flying fighters capable of more than three hundred knots off the decks of aircraft carriers.

  Bitter and Canidy each watched their students perform the preflight check, and then watched them climb into the forward cockpits. They took a last look themselves, and then climbed into the aft cockpits and put on leather helmets. The plane captains and the ground handlers pulled the props through a rotation, the engines were started, and the chocks were pulled.

  Ed Bitter’s ensign turned around and looked at him. Bitter nodded and pulled his goggles down over his eyes.

  ‘‘Pensacola Tower, Navy One-oh-one,’’ Bitter’s student called over his radio.

  ‘‘One-oh-one, Pensacola.’’

  "Pensacola, Navy One-oh-one, a flight of two N2S aircraft, destination Valdosta, Georgia, requests taxi and takeoff. ’’

  Pensacola Tower gave them the time, the altimeter, and the barometer, then taxi clearance to the threshold of runway 28. When the student pilot reported them in position, the tower gave permission to take off at one-minute intervals.

  They climbed to five thousand feet, and took up a course that was almost due east. Canidy’s student took up a position two hundred yards above Bitter’s Stearman. Canidy’s student would fly Bitter’s student’s wing for half the trip, and then their positions would be reversed.

  Two aircraft were sent on each cross-country flight, alternating as leader, so there would always be one aircraft checking on the other. Now that he had come to understand the reasoning behind the flight program, Ed Bitter had concluded that, like many other odd-on-the-surface facets of Navy policy, there was sound reasoning behind it.

  One part of the program was even an officially sanctioned ‘‘confuse your students’’ portion of the cross-country flight, designed to ensure that simply because they were about to be awarded the gold wings of a naval aviator, it would never enter their minds that they were anything but rank amateurs:

  13. DISORIENTATION.

  Purpose: to give student pilots the experience of suffering location disorientation, and the techniques of recovery therefrom.

  Method: At some point during the Montgomery- Mobile leg of Flight #48, while flying over the area marked on Aerial Navigation Chart (Instructors Only) NAS Pensacola 239, instructor pilots will, without previous warning to the student, take over the controls of the aircraft, and attempt to disorient the student pilot by such maneuvers as aerobatics, stalls, and low-altitude flight. The controls will then be returned to the student and he will be ordered to resume his original course and altitude.

  Evaluation: Instructor pilots will grade the student on his ability to reorient himself, taking into consideration the time and degree of assurance with which he is able to do so.

  The area marked on Aerial Navigation Chart (Instructors Only) NAS Pensacola 239 was a 25,000-acre property owned by the Carlson Publishing Company. It was in the pines, the management of Carlson Publishing Company being strongly convinced that it was just a matter of time before chemists came up with a means of using fast-growing loblolly pine for newsprint. Carlson Publishing Company published eleven medium-sized newspapers throughout the South, and these consumed a good deal of paper, all of which had to be purchased from mills using New England and Canadian pulpwood.

  While they were waiting for the chemists to find a solution to this expensive and galling problem, the property was used by the chairman of the board of the Carlson Publishing Company primarily as a hunting preserve in the fall, and a vacation site in the spring and summer.

  The chairman of the board, on behalf of his company, had been more than happy to grant the U.S. Navy permission to conduct low-level aerial flights, to include landing privileges, on the area now marked on the map. He understood the necessity to train pilots as realistically as possible, he and the admiral and the others having been sent off to fight the Hun with less than twenty-five hours’ total time in the air. Brandon Chambers had never forgotten that literally nauseating feeling of terror. He saw giving the Navy permission to use the land as his patriotic duty. And if some young pilot did dump his plane in the forests, the Navy would pay for the damages.

  Lieutenant Ed Bitter had heard the story about the admiral who had flown with the Lafayette Escadrille getting permission from another Escadrille pilot to use the land long before it was told to him while he was receiving training to become an instructor pilot. He had heard it from Brandon Chambers himself. Ed Bitter’s mother and Genevieve (Mrs. Brandon) Chambers were sisters.

  So far as he knew, no one at NAS Pensacola knew of his personal connection with The Plantation. Neither did anyone know that his father and his brother were respectively chairman of the board and presi
dent of Bitter Commodity Brokerage, Inc., of Chicago.

  Edwin Howell Bitter was an officer of the Regular Naval Establishment. It was neither seemly nor wise for a Regular naval officer to let it be known that he had an outside income from a trust fund that was approximately four times his Navy pay.

  2

  At 10:20, almost exactly two hours after they had taken off from Pensacola, they landed at Valdosta, Georgia, where the airport had a Navy fueling contract. They topped off the tanks, checked the weather again, and were airborne at 11:05. This time, Ed’s student flew Dick’s student’s wing.

  They made Maxwell Field, the Army Air Corps base in Montgomery, Alabama, at ten minutes to one. The officers’ mess there closed at one, and they just made it in time to eat. It was five minutes to three before they got off the ground again, with Ed’s student again assuming the role of flight leader.

  An hour out of Montgomery, when they were just about halfway between Maxwell Field and Brookley Field, the Army Air Corps base in Mobile, Alabama, Lieutenant (j.g.) Ed Bitter clapped the speaking tube over his mouth and shouted to his student that he had it.

  The student pilot signified his understanding of and compliance with the order by holding both his hands above his head. Bitter pushed the stick forward, and the Stearman, the wind screaming in the guy wires of the wing, dove for the ground.

  Behind him, Dick Canidy took the controls from his student and dove in pursuit. For fifteen minutes, sometimes right on the deck, sometimes climbing to eight or nine thousand, they engaged in a mock dogfight, always moving south, paralleling their original course, toward The Lodge on The Plantation.

  By prearrangement, once they spotted The Lodge, Dick Canidy would break off the dogfight and fly out of sight of Bitter’s aircraft. He would swoop down the Alabama River with his wheels ten feet off the water. That always served to disorient student pilots. Bitter, meanwhile, would go down on the deck, fifty feet above the pine treetops, and buzz The Lodge. He would then roll the Stearman, while flashing over The Lodge at no more than a hundred feet, straighten it out, and then shout over the speaking tube to his student: ‘‘You’ve got it. Take us to Mobile.’’